Sunday, 10th of July, 2016

Post-classical experimental electronica and a bit of politics to start…

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Our first track tonight comes from the brilliant industrial hip-hop (noise-hop?) trio Clipping, one of the best new groups of the last few years. They’ve got a new EP out which is excellent (but has pretty heavy adult themes)… but tonight I’m playing a track which was written specifically in response to Ferguson and the beginnings of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, which has been so central to this week’s appalling and depressing news (a weekly roundabout for 2016 it seems).

Aphex Twin is very much back, although it feels a bit like he’s just fucking around in the studio and then releasing stuff when he feels like it – so two of the tracks on this new EP are tiny little synth tests, nice but kind of pointless. I’ve never been much of a fan of the Analogue Bubblebath / Analord side of things – his acid house/techno stuff – so it was nice to see that a couple of tracks here are just darn pretty, with lovely melodies and pads, and some fidgety drum machine stuff in the second half.

Sydney’s Marcus Whale is a classically-trained composer & musician even though you’d know him best from his r’n’b/house/experimental electronic groups Collarbones and BV. He’ll segue us nicely into the “er, I guess it’s sort of classical” section of the show following. Marcus launches his incredible new album Inland Sea on Friday (15th of July) in Sydney, and this is a typical track from the album, full of passion and explosive musical creativity. You can read about all the tracks in this excellent interview – this one in particular addresses white Australia’s “black history” and the “white blanket of forgetfulness” which has been laid over our genocidal past.

So our new artist and a big feature tonight is the composer and producer Yannis Kyriakides. Born in Cyprus, he grew up in Britain and has been based in the Netherlands since the early ’90s, where he co-runs the Unsounds label with experimental guitarist Andy Moor of The Ex and Isabelle Vigier, who is responsible for the label’s wonderful & distinctive design & artwork. Kyriakides is an accomplished composer, frequently juxtaposing and interpolating live and studio electronics with compositions for classical ensembles and voice – but he also collaborates with Moor on music that draws as much from Moor’s anarcho-punk, jagged experimental guitar sounds and Moor’s minimal electronic collaborations elsewhere. Their excellent album of Rebetika covers / remixes / interpretations, originally released on Unsounds in 2010, has recently been re-released on vinyl by Unsounds & London label Discrepant. Kyriakides’ latest work Lunch Music is inspired by William S Burroughs’ seminal novel The Naked Lunch, and features Dutch ensembles Slagwerk Den Haag on percussion and Silbersee on vocals, with lyrics taken from the Burroughs text. With electronic noises & vinyl manipuluation from Kyriakides it’s at times quite disturbing, but appropriately enough also quite hilarious and beautiful – it’s particularly cool when the manipulated, slowed-down records blur with the stunning live singing.

Our last artist is also a stunning vocalist. Ian William Craig is a classically-trained singer, although publicity dubbing him an “opera singer” is slightly misleading, as he’s never performed opera. Nevertheless, his voice is something to be believed… His music is frequently built solely from layered vocals, but often also uses piano, guitar, squeezeboxes and organs and homemade instruments – but most importantly, all of it is “processed”, degraded, distorted, looped and glitched on an array of tape machines. Even if not for his bewitching vocals, this tape manipulation lends an otherworldly sheen to his sounds… It’s quite exquisitely beautiful and immersive. It’s also quite astonishingly of a piece with the predominantly digital processing of artists like Tim Hecker, Christian Fennesz and others. I highly recommend exploring the (mostly freely downloadable) work on his Bandcamp – the vinyl & cassettes are mostly sold out, but seek them out if you can!

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email: utilityfog at frogworth dot com
Utility Fog teeters on the cusp between acoustic and electronic, organic and digital. Constantly changing and rearranging, this aural cloud of nanotech consumes genres and spits them out in new forms. Whether cataloguing the jungle resurgence, tracking the ups and downs of noise and drone, or unearthing the remnants of glitch and folktronica, all is contextualised within artist & genre histories for a fulfilling sonic journey.
Since all these genre names are already pretty ridiculous, we thought we'd coin a new one. So "postfolkrocktronica" it is. Wear it.